


Last Year: The Sex Website Debacle

by standalone



Series: Teachers AU [2]
Category: Simon Snow series - Gemma T. Leslie
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-05
Updated: 2016-02-05
Packaged: 2018-05-18 04:25:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,613
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5898112
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/standalone/pseuds/standalone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is a little backstory for <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/5898043/chapters/13596274"><em>This is Mr. Pitch</em></a>. </p><p>If you're not reading that longer piece, this probably won't make a lot of sense.</p><p>(And it's explicit, but not in a fun sexy way.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Last Year: The Sex Website Debacle

****Granted, Baz didn’t look himself up on that horrible harassment website last year, but then, neither did his rigid principles interject to stop his little sister Ari from reading his whole page to him when _she_ did.

Here's how that whole thing went down: over an after-dinner glass of wine, Baz was telling Ari the scandalous drama of that month's staff meeting, at which a few female teachers had demanded that the school take action to stomp out a new website where students rated their teachers on qualities such as “build,” “swagger,” and “sex talk,” and a few teachers (male) had immediately pulled up the site on their phones in what quickly devolved from a facade of concerned research to straight-up harassment fandom. “Check out what someone wrote about Ms. Sullivan!” “Can you believe anyone has the balls to write this shit? And—oh god, about _Chilblains_?” “You should see what they're saying about you here, Madder!”

Baz had been on the verge of constructing the witheringly perfect sentence to showcase the utter abhorrence of this entire situation (thus far, he kept snagging on _[When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes](https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/when-disgrace-fortune-and-mens-eyes-sonnet-29) _ ) when across the library, Ms. Bunce had shot to her feet, eyes blazing, and said, in her teacher voice, carrying and clear and controlled, “This. Is. Enough.”

As Baz explained, later, to Ari, everyone listened to Bunce. She'd only started a few years before him, those years where he'd been getting his first Masters degree, but she'd built an iron-clad reputation in her near-decade at Watford High. When Mr. Gordon had stepped down from the role of English Department Chair, they'd stumbled over themselves to nominate Bunce. Her election had been unanimous.

“Please,” she said, tone firm. “Put down the phones. Not because I am a teacher,” she glared at Coach Mac, “but because I am your colleague and because I am asking you.”

Around the room, teachers were hushing, guiltily pocketing their phones or slipping them slyly into their laps.

“I understand that it may seem funny. Some of you might want to argue that this is even a form of flattery—just a harmless expression of attraction.”

She smiled, and Baz shifted forward in his seat. The knife was coming, and he wanted to see it gleam before she thrust it home.

“I wasn't going to bring this up. I wasn't going to make it about me. But a student sent me a link—she was trying to help, I think—and once you're looking, you can't not read. At least, I couldn't. And once you've read a thing, it's hard not to look for it.”

She turned to Mr. Huynh, who was seated a few feet from her. “Can I borrow your phone, please, Mr. Huynh?” Going red, he pulled his phone from under the table and handed it to her. She tapped the screen for a moment, then looked back up. “I'm going to read a little from this website so you can all hear. I want you to notice what it does to your brain. What happens when you hear a salacious image attached to a person you know?” She looked down at the little screen in her hand and began to read. “ _Teacher Name: Penelope Bunce. School: Watford High. Subject: English. Age: 31. Sex: Female._ ” She paused. “This stuff is all public knowledge. _Ratings averages (based on eight reviews): Build: Two—_ two what are those images supposed to be? explosions, I guess you'd say? _Two explosions_.”

In the nervous room, someone coughed. “Bangs.”

“Oh, of course.” Bunce laughed. “ _Two bangs. Swagger: Four bangs. Sex talk: Four point five bangs._ ” Everyone was holding their breath now. Please, you could see them thinking, let this be over. But Bunce kept going. “ _Fuckability average: Three point five bangs._ The numbers don't mean much, though,” she said. “As I'm sure the math teachers can attest, it's hard to remember most numbers for long. An image, though....”

She scrolled down on the phone's screen. “Here's one, from someone whose username is _boobies_ .” A few teachers were turning away, but it wasn't like this was some kind of spectacle. Bunce's fury slid smooth as sand in an hourglass. “The post title is ' _My anaconda don't want none unless you got Bunce buns_ .' Clever. This appears to be [an emulation](https://play.google.com/music/preview/T2ncfkwf2leegiodz2fljvklx2m?lyrics=1&utm_source=google&utm_medium=search&utm_campaign=lyrics&pcampaignid=kp-lyrics): ' _Ms. Bunce got that jiggle./ U know she likes to wiggle/ when she gets that hefty/ ass up on some thick D,/ but if it were me teasing/ I'd get my hands squeezing/ them big boobies while she sucked me/ until she can't see/ cuz her teacher glasses is/ dripping with my jizz.”_

Ms. Bunce looked up at a crowd that wouldn't meet her eye. “It can be hard to erase an image from the mind. Especially if it's an image that strikes us as naughty or inappropriate. Had you read this on your own, as some of you might have, you might find it difficult to look at me after without seeing me through the lens of someone else's fantasy.” (Baz choked on an inappropriate laugh that tried to explode from him here; trust Bunce to work in sly references to her come-spattered glasses while chastising you for thinking about them.) “And I think it's important to note that it's a fantasy in which this character, 'Ms. Bunce,' is an object who exists only to satisfy someone else's desires. She is _not me_ . You know no intimate details about _me_. Fiction with a real name is still fiction. But the reason half of you won't look at me right now is that the distinction is hard to remember.”

“And this is dangerous. We don't usually want to think that we take away other people's agency, but we do it all the time. Let's not pretend this is something other than what it is: It's a tool of oppression, and like any oppression, fighting back starts with naming the problem.”

Awkwardly admiring, the staff began to murmur, then squawk out approval, and a scattered swell of applause was just beginning to rise up when Principal Magee, who had not looked up from the phone this whole time, pocketed it in disgust, exclaimed, “Plain and simple, this is pornography!,” clapped for order, and said, “Please, I'm sure we have _professional_ matters we could be discussing.”

Principal Magee is the worst.

*

“So?” Ari said when he was finished. “What's yours say?”

“My what?” Baz asked. The righteous clarity of anger was fading and so was he, tilting comfortably sideways in the squashy cushions of his couch while trying to keep his sloshing wine glass upright.

“Your page?”

His head felt fuzzy enough that he didn't care to unravel this question.

“On the site?” she continued. “Try and tell me you didn't look.”

He chewed empty air for a moment, trying to feel his teeth. “I didn't look?”

“Right.”

“I didn't? ... I mean, you mean _did I look myself up on the teacher-fuckers site?_ , right?”

“Yeah.”

“So yeah, I didn't.”

“Right.”

Pretty sure that they'd had the same exchange literally seconds earlier, Baz scrambled out of the infinite loop. “Why would I even... I mean, objectification, right? And whoever runs this has to be the scum that clings to the lowest tiers of humanity, so why would I favor them with the honor of my patronage? And anyway, I'm a man.”

She just laughed, for what felt like an inordinately long amount of time, and then reached under the end table for his laptop.

“t e a c h e r f u c k e r s,” she muttered as she typed the letters. “Dot com? Dot net? Dot _org_?”

“It's not that,” he said, trying to recall. “edubang. It's edubang.net.”

Her fingers fluttered on the keys. A moment later, she was reading: “ _Tyrannus Pitch_.” She scanned the page. “Average based on seventeen reviews. You get fives in build and sex talk, but bad news, just a three in swagger.”

“That is uniformly gross,” he said, trying to comprehend first _seventeen reviews_ and then to imagine what would possess a student to give his _swagger_ even the modicum of attention required to press a radio button.

“You gotta work it, B.”

He rolled over to glare at her, almost falling off the couch in the process. “Allow me to rephrase: This is the grossest thing you've ever said to me.”

She stuck out her lip at him. “You've got a 4.33 fuckability average, babe. If you could get that swagger up, even just to four, you'd be the bang king of Watford High.”

“I am not going to 'work it' in my _high-school English classroom_ .” Baz pushed himself up to sitting again. “Is this a fever dream? Why am I defending myself for not making myself sexy enough to _teenagers_? Who are underage? And who are my legal responsibility, and whom I am morally and ethically responsible for protecting from the ills of this, our corrupt...”

She cut off the diatribe before the strings could kick in. “Spare me.” And then she'd read him the fantasies, and he had not been able to look at his classroom desk (or storage closet or brown leather belt—the broader one with the punched designs; that writer had been very specific—or, most cutting of all, his own impassioned diatribes) in the same light since.

*

A month later, the site was gone. “Guess someone realized how obscene it was and took it down,” Baz said when he told Ari.

“Oh, poor old man,” she laughed, patting the top of his head. “You and the internet, you have _got_ to get to know each other better.”

**Author's Note:**

> Back to [the main story](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5898043/chapters/13596274).


End file.
